Streets play an essential role in our cities’ landscapes and experienced livability. However, street spaces have remained mostly unchanged for the last 100 years; during this time, the street was primarily for traffic, for cars and goods.
The challenges of the 21st century regenerate our streets, too. Pedestrian and bicycle mobility need an increasing amount of space, but also the fight against climate change, changes in weather patterns as well as biodiversity loss requires us to plant more trees, meadows and blossoming plants along our streets.
Future streets are places of meeting and activities for people of all ages. Our nearest environment is the street in front of our home and in the future there will be more room for lingering, sitting around, playing and having fun. Our aging population especially needs home streets that invite and attract people to get up and get out!
Kera #newstreet is a glimpse into the future. The Kera street of tomorrow is an experimental and a spatial entity that invites people to experience and envision future streets along with the solutions needed to implement them.
Future streets are multifunctional, variable and resilient environments that scale and adapt to different conditions. Kera #newstreet is a platform for experiments: it presents new technologies, spaces for lingering and playing, solutions to enhance biodiversity and new possibilities created by the circular economy.
Read more about the experiment.
The project is commissioned by City of Espoo.
Concept and production: Päivi Raivio (RaivioBumann & Parkly), Kimmo Rönkä (Rönkä Consulting) and Pekka Pakkanen (Planetary Architecture)
The experiment site includes innovative solutions from Parkly, Innogreen, Spotti, Kompan, Hyperion Robotics and Spolia Design.